Capitalising on Clojure to support AI-led crop forecasts

At Cervest we are building technology to support the agri-food ecosystem and regenerate our planet. We contend that science has the answers and that innovation has a key role to play in our success. As such we have also taken an innovative and forthright path in choosing Clojure as our technology stack.

As we look around at our contemporaries in London, we see our choice reflected back at us; innovative new companies within our sector and without have also adopted this technology. Signal, USwitch, Metail to name but a few are already with us at the vanguard. Others across Europe and North America are choosing this ecosystem as well. Clojure adoption is early by many standards, but innovators in London, and elsewhere, have bet on it. And so have we.

The annual international Clojure Conj held in late November in the US underlined this trend. There we found exciting stories of success and innovation – with Clojure – from around the world. Immediately afterwards, Clojure eXchange in London strengthened the story. There is no doubt that the language and its stack is relevant, powerful and well respected.

Clojure is capable of best-in-class performance in many arenas. The way in which the language puts data in the centre of everything is perfect for our needs – enabling us to process a huge volume of complex natural capital data. We acquire and store a lot of this data. We need to prepare and present this data to our data scientists. We also need to surface a lot of results and domain information to our clients.

In Clojure, data is at the core of everything the software engineer does. Data is Code. Code is Data. It’s all Data. Using this paradigm, across our business, without adding technologies is a huge advantage. ClojureScript even allows us to build our user interfaces in the same way, using the same syntax. Our developers do not need to context-switch or shift paradigm. From the top of the stack to the very back end, we have a consistent environment. The economies of effort are huge.

Clojure also attracts high calibre professionals; thoughtful, innovative people who tend towards elegant thinking, and coherent solutions to problems. Clojure is a language that rewards consideration in advance of action. Companies, like us, that adopt it are making a powerful statement about their engineering culture.

As we move into the next phase of our company’s life, Clojure is there to depend on. We are enlarging our Engineering team, and Clojure is a genuine draw. We are releasing products we could not have built in so timely a fashion with other technologies. The next phase of our platform is not a daunting prospect. Clojure gives us the confidence to be proactive, while minimising risk – a priceless advantage.

Note: about ClojureClojure is a [Lisp] (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language), a Lisp that runs on the JVM. The result is Functional programming within the Enterprise foundation of the Java ecosystem. Clojure provides a route to using the elegance of Lisp, and the power of FP in the Enterprise. It also offers a wealth of existing libraries and tooling from Java. These opportunities deliver power, performance, security, reliability and maintainability in equal measure.

André DuBuissonChief Product Officer

He’s successfully serviced diverse clients in product management, business analysis, UX and consulting. Recent engagements have included the innovative use of data science & technology in dynamic marketplaces and developing a large-scale customer engagement platform.

He has previously held product leadership positions at Victor Limited and Collinson Group, developing customer loyalty solutions for well-known international brands.

Ruiao HuResearch Resident

A computer scientist by trade and a mathematician at heart, Ruiao graduated from Imperial College London with an MEng degree in Joint Mathematics and Computer Science.

With industry experience in data engineering gained with world-leading finance firms, Ruiao has joined Cervest for the summer to construct data pipelines for a number of our upcoming projects.

Just as he joined Cervest, Ruiao achieved a first class MEng degree with the Governor’s Prize and Corporate Partnership Programme award for his final year project. After his time at Cervest he will pursue a PhD in stochastic geometric mechanics under the supervision of Prof Darryl Holm at Imperial College London.

James WalshResearch Resident

James is a Statistical Scientist with a bachelor’s degree in the subject awarded from the Statistics department at the University of Warwick.

James joins Cervest as part of his work with the Warwick Manufacturing Group and The Alan Turing Institute where he is a Research Assistant developing Physically Informed Hybrid models.

He will be spending his time at Cervest applying this expertise to simulating individual crop growth and constructing bulk processing technologies for modelling organic carbon content for soil quality monitoring. He has also worked in the risk team of financial consultants at Albourne Partners building simulations.

Mike ZotovResearch Resident

Mike has recently graduated with a first class honours degree in Mathematics from the University of Warwick.

Having studied Machine Learning as part of his degree, he has joined Cervest for the summer to work on deep generative models for de-noising remote-sensing data.

After his time at Cervest he will continue to pursue his passion for Machine Learning with a Master’s degree at Imperial College London.

Anna MosesBusiness Process Lead

Anna has broad experience helping organisations to define and operationalise their processes in order to achieve ambitious business objectives.

Anna has worked across the public, private, and charity sectors with a focus on organisational transformation through business analysis and behavioural science-focused change management, at organisations including the UK House of Commons, the Parliamentary Digital Service and leading US healthcare consultancy The Advisory Board Company.

Inspired by Cervest’s commitment to using technology for good, through both the delivery of game-changing products and an inclusive working environment, Anna is passionate about being part of the solution to the climate crisis.

She has a BA in Political Science and History from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Michael GriffithsSenior Engineer

Michael has been building software for over a decade as both a developer and analyst. He has worked and consulted in a broad spectrum of domains – including insurance, payments and e-commerce – for both early-stage startups and established companies. He is also a passionate open-source developer, being a co-maintainer of a number of developer tools for the Clojure programming language. Further, he has been a teacher for the ClojureBridge organisation, which provides free programming workshops for underrepresented groups in tech.

A dedicated environmentalist, having worked for the National Laboratory Service arm of the UK Environment Agency before entering the software industry, he joined Cervest in 2019 with a commitment to use his expertise to build flexible and scalable distributed software systems to help our world adapt to the growing climate crisis, while promoting sustainability and science-driven decision making.

Michael holds a B.Sc. in Theoretical Physics from University College London.

Agnes Schim van der LoeffResearch Resident

Agnes recently graduated with a first class honours BA in Arabic and Development Studies from SOAS University of London. Alongside her studies she has also worked as Environment Officer in the SOAS students’ union. Passionate about environmental justice, she plans to pursue a master’s degree in political ecology.

Agnes has joined Cervest to research the ethical implications of AI in relation to climate change and food security, and thus help ensure Cervest’s pioneering technology adheres to the highest ethical standards. With her social science background she is interested in the social, economic and political dimensions of climate change and will therefore also conduct policy-related research to inform Cervest’s engagement with policy makers.